Survey of Tim Winton’s fiction leaves things unsaid

Tim Winton’s novels have spoken ‘intimately to many Australians and about Australia to the world’ for nearly 40 years.

Author Tim Winton at Albany, Western Australia. Picture: Colin Murty

Tim Winton is impossible to categorise. As literary scholar Lyn McCredden puts it, he’s ‘‘a robust, ponytailed figure, a surfie, fisherman and ordinary bloke who also happens to be a multi-award-winning author’’. His work has been critically acclaimed, but he hasn’t attended a literary awards ceremony since winning The Australian/Vogel’s LiteraryAward for An Open Swimmer in 1982.

In The Fiction of Tim Winton, McCredden provides an overview of this intriguing author’s career. As she writes, Winton’s fiction has spoken ‘‘intimately to many Australians and about Australia to the world’’ for nearly four decades.

McCredden begins by exploring the ‘‘preoccupation’’ that many of Winton’s characters have with words, and (correspondingly) the significant role language has played in his fiction. She investigates the sometimes controversial representations of gender in Winton’s novels. She discusses the critical reception. She also explores various themes in his books, including redemption, place and belonging.

McCredden draws on a range of theoretical approaches. These include poststructuralist, postcolonial and feminist literary theories. They include studies on sacredness and religion in literature (Winton is a Christian which he occasionally invokes in his fiction). McCredden also draws on existing scholarship about Winton. This is a field she has previously contributed to (see Tim Winton: Collected Essays, which McCredden co-edited with Nathanael O’Reilly in 2014).

McCredden’s style is lucid, and her close readings of Winton’s novels are an absolute pleasure to read. She is clearly enthusiastic about this author’s fiction. In my opinion, the best literary scholarship is animated by a strong interest in the topic at hand. This is vastly preferable to the kind of dry, dispassionate prose, and the sense of detachment from the subject under investigation, that characterises so much academic writing.

Yet The Fiction of Tim Winton is not an uncritical celebration of the four-time Miles Franklin winner. McCredden aims to highlight the cultural importance of Winton’s work. She acknowledges that ‘‘it is the role of the critic to seek engagement with readers around what she or he sees as the core critical questions — and even the paradoxes — that arise from the literary work’’. For McCredden, ‘‘in Winton’s writings, the deeply sacred aspect of being is constantly addressed’’.

Highlighting Winton’s cultural importance is, of course, a necessary part of justifying why an entire book should be devoted to his work. Sure, he is a talented wordsmith — but he’s not the only one. Winton has been showered with awards, but this in itself is no reason he deserves an exclusive study of his own.

Perhaps the most compelling section of the book is the chapter that focuses on class. This is a topic that has been somewhat marginalised in contemporary Australian public discourses in recent times. Winton’s own essay on this topic (published in The Monthly in 2013) is subtitled ‘‘The C Word’’. In that essay, Winton recalls the incomprehension expressed by a reporter when he dared to raise this issue.

McCredden points out that ‘‘the authorial persona of Tim Winton, lodged in the public imagination, through Winton’s self-imaging, and through his characters, is located squarely in his working-class origins’’. In his Monthly essay, Winton recalls one of his grandfathers working — likely driven by financial necessity — until an advanced age.

Yet Winton also grew up during the 1970s, a decade when ‘‘further education became, for a brief moment, possible for nearly all classes, and when many, including Winton, took up that life-changing opportunity’’. Nowadays Winton may be regarded as middle-class, but he has not lost sight of his class history. McCredden demonstrates how his novels reflect ‘‘the shifting nature of all class groupings and definitions’’.

The Fiction of Tim Winton could best be described as a survey book. McCredden covers expansive territory in a relatively compact 158 pages. Any of the topics raised throughout the text could be the subject of a separate monograph. For example, while McCredden makes some salient points about gender in Winton’s writing, there is much more that could be said about this issue.

McCredden writes: ‘‘Feminism in the new millennium is alive to the shifting, myth-drenched mysteries of becoming and identity.’’ I agree, but then, these ‘‘mysteries’’ have always been the subjects of feminist inquiry. They are not unique to feminists writing in the present era.

Similarly, some other issues raised could have been developed further. For instance, McCredden includes some brief but interesting remarks about nostalgia in That Eye, the Sky (1986) and Cloudstreet (1991). These remarks are, however, buried in a chapter that addresses the ongoing tensions between ‘‘popular’’ and ‘‘literary’’ fiction. Those tensions are interesting, yes, and they are relevant to an understanding of Winton’s career, but they’ve also been discussed at length elsewhere.

At this point I must disclose my own interest in nostalgia as it relates to Winton’s writing. I first encountered Winton’s work at high school in the 1990s. I recall the silent thrill of uncovering heady and complex (for a teenager) discourses of love, faith and identity that were tucked away inside Scission (1985) and That Eye, the Sky. I remember the fun of flicking through Lockie Leonard, Human Torpedo (1990) in my early teens.

For readers such as myself, then, Winton’s writing has itself become the subject of nostalgia, even as the author has continued to publish books into the 21st century. Winton’s books — or at least his earlier works — transport me back to a particular time and place. And place has been such a pivotal theme in his writing.

The Fiction of Tim Winton is an intelligent and exhaustively researched contribution to studies of Winton’s writing. This book is also an example of sophisticated and immensely readable literary analysis.

Jay Daniel Thompson teaches at the University of Melbourne.

The Fiction of Tim Winton: Earthed and Sacred

By Lyn McCredden

Sydney University Press, 158pp, $30